It’s a week into the season, and you’d be wise not to form any firm takeaways at this point. Brian Anderson probably won’t hit .500 all season. Corbin Burnes probably won’t have a 9.64 ERA all year. The Rays aren’t going to win 162 games. (Probably.) You get the idea.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can start to look at, either. Some numbers become meaningful pretty quickly. And others? They might not last all year, yet they’re fascinating to see right now. Here are five of our favorites so far.

All numbers are through Wednesday’s games.

1. BABIP is up! Maybe. It’s weird

With the shift limitations in play, the idea was that a few more batted balls would turn into hits, and not nearly as many would find their way into the gloves of fielders who were positioned in spots that they generally were not for much of baseball history. So, is it working? Maybe.

BABIP stands for Batting Average on Balls in Play, or batting average without including strikeouts or home runs, with the idea just being “how often do balls in the field of play turn into hits.” As you’d expect in a shift-limited world, it’s a little higher this year. It’s .294, up from the .282 it was in 2022’s first week. While it didn’t stay at .282 all year long – it landed at .290 – let’s try to keep it “first-week based,” to get closer to an apples-to-apples comparison. Which was the point. Fantastic.

Here, though, is where it gets weird.

A) It’s up by more for righties than lefties. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? In the first week of 2023, righty BABIP jumped by 14 points, from .286 to .300. But lefty BABIP has gone up by only 9 points, from .276 to .285.

B) Lefty ground ball BABIP is barely up at all. This is the fascinating part. Last year, in the first week, lefties managed a meager .214 BABIP on grounders. This year, it’s all the way up to … .218. Grounders weren’t terribly successful in the past, and they won’t be now, either – fielders are just too good.

But that doesn’t mean there’s been no impact, either, because look at this:

C) Lefty line drive BABIP is up by a lot. A LOT. In last year’s first week, lefty liners led to a .607 BABIP, because line drives are extremely valuable hits. In this year’s first week, lefty liners have led to a .656 BABIP, which is a pretty massive increase. It would be the highest full-season number since 2013, which is basically right before the shift took hold across the Majors.

Why is this? It’s too early to say for certain, but it might be early confirmation of something that seemed to be noticeable during Spring Training, which is that there was too much focus on “you can’t have three infielders on one side” and not enough focus on “and the two infielders you have must each be on the dirt, not in the grass.”

You can see this playing out in the data just by looking at how deep fielders are playing – or, more accurately, aren’t playing. In each of the last two seasons, second basemen (with lefty batters up) played an average of 156 feet deep. This year? It’s 146 feet deep, and having to stand 10 feet closer to the batter isn’t a minor difference.

And as for those grounders?

“There's no worse feeling than hitting the ball hard up the middle and seeing the shortstop standing right there,” said Eric Hosmer this winter at Chicago’s fan convention.

Up-the-middle ground ball BABIP for lefties currently sits in a tracking-era (since 2008) low. Those probably aren’t ever coming back.

2. A bunch of hitters have set personal-best exit velocity marks

We’re not talking players who have debuted in 2023, such as top prospects Anthony Volpe and Jordan Walker. We’re talking about guys with at least some amount of experience, who, in the first week, have shown off something a little bit more impressive than they ever had before.

So let’s set the requirement here for “only players who had at least 50 previous games of Major League experience,” and we’re left with nine batters who now have a new hardest-hit ball on their resume.

• 116.5 mph – Jake Burger, CWS
• 114.8 mph – Taylor Motter, STL
• 113.2 mph – MJ Melendez, KC
• 112.5 mph – Daulton Varsho, TOR
• 111.7 mph – Spencer Torkelson, DET
• 110.8 mph – Will Smith, LAD
• 109.7 mph -- Mike Yastrzemski, SF
• 109.4 mph – Josh Lowe, TB
• 109.1 mph – Brendan Donovan, STL
• 106.8 mph – David Villar, SF

Each and every one of these batters has a story worth telling, but we’d like to focus on two of them – and while it may seem like one batted ball doesn’t matter, there is evidence that being able to top 108 mph has a meaningful impact on the rest of your season.

Perhaps most important is Torkelson, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 Draft, because he’s supposed to be a cornerstone of the next generation of Tigers hitters. His debut was – to be totally blunt – miserable, as he posted a mere .203/.285/.319 line (77 OPS+) that included a trip back to Triple-A. But it was hard to ignore how much he tore the cover off the ball in Spring Training, where he had the best hard-hit rate of anyone who had at least 25 batted balls (note, here, that Statcast tracking is mostly limited to Grapefruit League parks) and all of a sudden he’s got a new best this quickly.

It’s a similar story with Motter, except with an incredibly different background. What’s the opposite of being a 23-year-old No. 1 overall pick? Being a 33-year-old journeyman who is on his seventh Major League team and has put in time in Korea and the independent leagues too. Motter, like Torkelson, mashed in Spring Training, with the seventh-best hard-hit rate. Now, all of a sudden, he’s touching 114 mph, which is rarefied air – only 0.1% of batted balls were hit that hard last year. If Motter is the latest in a long line of “wait, who, the Cardinals found a guy who is doing what?” players, well, you knew about it right away.

3. Maybe we were all too quick to dismiss the Dodgers lineup

If the primary word to describe the Dodgers' winter wasn’t “disappointing,” then maybe that’s only because “confounding” was more appropriate. After all, they let superstar shortstop Trea Turner and still-productive team legend Justin Turner depart, yet the only replacements were late-career rebound bets (J.D. Martinez, Jason Heyward), or last summer’s Minor League trades (Trayce Thompson), or young players facing pressure to perform right now (Miguel Vargas, James Outman). Throw in the unfortunate season-ending injury to Gavin Lux, and the Dodger lineup looked more vulnerable than it had in a decade.

… and then what happened?

• As it stands, the Dodgers have baseball’s best hard-hit rate.
• They have baseball’s third-lowest ground ball rate.
• They have baseball’s second-best home run per fly ball rate.
• No team is hitting it harder in the air.
• They’re essentially tied for baseball’s lowest chase rate.
• Vargas has baseball’s lowest chase rate (an obscene 2%), and Heyward has already hit a ball harder than any Dodger did in the entire 2022 season.

Plus, Smith, their catcher, is on the list of players above with new personal bests. If you want to point out that they’ve only played Colorado and Arizona, neither of which are expected to have strong pitching staffs, that’s totally fair. Maybe it won’t last – it certainly can’t, not exactly like this. But for anyone looking for signs of the lineup’s demise, it’s not here yet.

4. Four-seam/sinker velo is up, but usage is down

This is hardly news. This happens every year. In fact, we noted it in last year’s early-season version of this piece. But with the new rules in the books, there were at least some questions about what might (or might not) change, and with the caveat that it’s just a week into the season … nothing has changed.

Approximately a third of fastballs (four-seamers and sinkers) are thrown 95 mph or harder, which is more than two-and-a-half times what it was in 2008.

But only 46% of pitches are four-seamers or two seamers in the first place, a huge drop from the usual 55-60% it had been for years.

Expect an update from us on exactly this topic next April, too.

5. Ronald Acuña Jr. looks healthy again

One of the nice things about Statcast data is that certain things are meaningful very, very quickly. That is, it might take hundreds of plate appearances to take someone’s batting average seriously, but you hardly need to see Hunter Greene throw more than two fastballs to know that he throws extremely hard.

It works similarly for running speed, which now have 2023 leaderboards available at Baseball Savant, and which is presently topped by Oakland’s Esteury Ruiz, who stole 85 bases at several Minor League levels last year. You can tell pretty quickly that he’s fast, and, say, José Abreu is not. All of which is a way to talk about Acuña, who had – by his lofty standards – a down year last year, recovering from 2021 knee surgery.

Acuña’s speed was down from its usual lofty perch at or near the 100th percentile of all baserunners, which is as good as it gets.

• 2018: 97
• 2019: 96
• 2020: 96
• 2021: 97
• 2022: 82

But he was also getting slower within the context of the season, too, because in September, his 27.7 ft/sec average sprint speed was the slowest month of his career. (And, for what it’s worth, barely above the 27 ft/sec Major League average.) On a likely related note, his usually solid defense ranked among baseball’s weakest.

It was worth wondering whether he was hesitant to tax the knee, or was just no longer capable of reaching those top-end speeds. Consider that worry alleviated, because so far, he’s back into the 96th percentile, or exactly where he’d been pre-injury. Plus, on Wednesday, when he beat out an infield single hit to slick-fielding Cardinals shortstop Tommy Edman, he made it from home to first base in 4.16 seconds. That would have ranked as his sixth-fastest home-to-first time of the entire 2022 season. It’s nice to just look at his .313/.421/.500 line and say Acuña is back, but we look at this data as well – and Acuña is back.